Jack Lindsay's book is aimed at rounding out the story of the Normans. In the foreward he points out that he wants to "cast the net more widely" and so he begins with the Viking background to the Normans (and of course the importance of this to the English lords that would be defeated in the 1060s) and the importance of the Normans elsewhere in the world - particularly the Crusades and the history of Southern Europe.
It's a laudable plan, and really should fill in the gaps in history that my school education left me with. But the problem is that the book itself is very difficult. Lindsay fills every page with a myriad of detail, jumps back and forth between chapters in a way that obscures the whole picture and cannot decide whether he is telling a historical story or giving an account of the economic basis to the transition from Anglo-Saxon society to Feudalism under the Normans. Sadly I was bored by much of the book, despite finding that Lindsay was trying to deal with interesting topics - there was simply too much detail.
Readers of this blog who are interested in these things will find the author more fascinating than the book. Jack Lindsay was a committed Communist who was awarded the "Soviet Order of the Badge of Honour" in 1967. He wrote about 169 books - novels, history, poetry and biography - and clearly had an incredible well rounded knowledge. The source material for The Normans is filled with primary and secondary materials that demonstrate very detailed research. Lindsay's politics come through in his economic analysis:
The considerable orderliness of Anglo-Norman feudalism was thus the result of working out and applying a particular aspect of the feudal system under which land was the prim source of value and the extraction of profit from it (and from other value-creating sources) was done by non-economic methods: that is, through the lord's physical power to evict, kill and damage.Lindsay sees Norman society as a qualitative step upward from the early feudalism of Anglo-Saxon society, celebrating it's "advanced" nature over other areas:
Normandy was one of the most advanced areas where the close link between land-holding and military service had developed; only a few other areas such as Flanders or Barcelona could be compared with it. It has even been called the cradle of feudalism: a term which is applicable enough if we take it to mean that in it the full logical conclusions of military tenures were first worked out in precise terms.And rightly Lindsay emphasises the violence at the heart of Norman feudalism, seeing this as a break with what has existed before.
Under feudalism the lord deals with the producer in an open way, taking products, money or services directly by means of his superior power, whether that power is expressed nakedly through his retainers or in a legal and political form through feudal courts.Having recently read Rosamond Faith's The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England it was noticeable how Lindsay too shows that there is a continuity and break with the earlier kin-based systems. But I felt that Lindsay emphasises the violent physical break, rather than the combination of this and the way that the Normans developed and used existing relations that Faith explains. Lindsay saying that there was a "sudden leap into fief Feudalism".
These debates are interesting and Lindsay marshals much material. Perhaps other readers and historians will get more from this, but I felt over-whelmed and bored by the vast amount of material, the feeling that the author wasn't able to selectively decide what information was necessary and, sometimes, a strange selectivity about what was important or not (only a single sentence about the killing of Thomas Beckett for instance). There's a lot here, but may be not the best introduction to the period.
Related Reviews
Faith - The Moral Economy of the Countryside
Bloch - Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Dependence
Parker - The Northmen's Fury
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